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Stability of using cross reference vs. hyperlink for huge document

Anonymous
2014-09-02T12:20:04+00:00

Hi, 

If you need to add several thousands to 10~15 thousands of links to a document, what would you recommend?

For the last project we needed 4~5 thousands of links and we used hyperlink to link to (auto-bookmarked) headings. That worked o.k.

However, this time there are around 10 thousands of links so we searched for some way to ease the process. 

We could do some VBA programming to add cross reference automatically.

(All links are to internal target, and adding hyperlink by comparing names does not seem doable for us.)

The question is, is it stable enough to manage a word document with 10 thousands of cross reference? 

I've heard that the document containing too many fields can be corrupted easily. 

Will it be safer to stick to hyperlink instead?

For your reference, the document size varies from 2MByte to 30MByte.

And we are planning to add them by master document function. (which we did in the last project, producing 40-50MByte bulk when converted to PDF)

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  1. Paul Edstein 82,861 Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
    2014-09-02T23:47:57+00:00

    Cross-references and hyperlinks both use fields. Word can support up to 2,147,483,647 fields in a single document. The advantages of cross-references over hyperlinks include:

    • the link name updates to reflect changes in the target name;

    • look like normal text (not hyperlinks) for documents that are to be printed.

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  2. Paul Edstein 82,861 Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
    2014-09-03T12:58:49+00:00
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  3. Paul Edstein 82,861 Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
    2014-09-03T00:40:19+00:00

    Your reference to the use of a master document is worrying. These are notoriously unstable and prone to catastrophic data loss. See:

    http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/General/WhyMasterDocsCorrupt.htm

    http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/General/RecoverMasterDocs.htm

    Although these articles are some years old, all Word versions similarly affected. See also:

    http://www.addbalance.com/word/masterdocuments.htm

    Since Word can handle documents of up to 512Mb in size, with 32Mb of text, I doubt that you'd need more than a single document. If you prefer to work with separate documents and link them, you can do that via INCLUDETEXT fields. However, cross-referencing (or hyperlinking) content across separate documents is much less straightforward than doing it within a document.

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  4. Anonymous
    2014-09-03T00:06:29+00:00

    Thanks for your reply.

    But as far as I know, plain hyperlink does not use field. The display name of hyperlink is not affected by field update when the target's name is changed, isn't it?

    Back to cross reference (xref), would it be safe to add xref to sub-documents first and then join them by master document function? No hazard of conflict or broken links?

    Each sub-documents will contain several hundreds to thousands of xref and master will have about 10~15 thousands of xref.

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